Norman Holt: A Story of the Army of the Cumberland

No writer is better than Charles King at bringing the reader vividly and realistically into the life of a U. S. Army soldier during the late-19th-early-20th century.  Because of his personal experience as an officer in the conflicts of that period, he not only gets the historical details correct, but also the settings, moods, and day-to-day life, including the divisiveness of the Civil War and the personal, romantic, financial, and family life of the soldiers living on those far-flung military posts along the western frontier, who fought the Indian Wars.

Although his particular forte was writing about the Indian Wars of the West, always remember that most of the officers in those Army units were first of all veterans of the Civil War, including Mr. King himself, who didn’t graduate from West Point until 1866 but served during the immediate aftermath as an officer of occupation forces.  Published originally in 1900, Norman Holt: A Story of the Army of the Cumberland tells the story of a young Kentucky man divided from neighbors and family, as so many men were who lived in the border states, by loyalties to opposite sides.  He is vilified and slandered by almost everybody, his loyalty by his chosen allies in the North questioned, his choice of sides demeaned by his family and acquaintances fighting for the South.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.